Part of the reason that Amtrak is expensive is that it's so slow. For a flight from Chicago to Seattle you only need to pay pilots/flight attendants/etc for around 5 hours of work, whereas for Amtrak it's 46 hours or more.
You can get a California zephyer ticket from Chicago->Seattle for 160 in coach one way. That's a really good deal for 2k+ miles, generous baggage allowance, etc (if you can tolerate that).
Sleepers can go 1k+ for the 2.5d. In the winter (what I did) was 600$. I'm also not paying for the efficency. I'm paying for the experience of the hotel, meals, convenence of travel, and the ability to watch out the window.
Train prices go up a lot (a factor of 2 or more) when it’s close to the time of the train, since the price is based on how full the train is currently booked. You might get cheaper train trips by booking further out.
Buses will still beat the cost, but they’re slower and less comfortable.
I've never seen this personally (living in DC area since 2014). At best, flights were on par and you still had to transport from airport to destination vs being likely in the city center (as noted elsewhere in this thread already) and deal with all the other airport time. Bus is definitely cheaper today though with highly variable experience along the way.
If you consider the time-money spent in security checkpoints and riding taxis it’s a wash. Amtrak is able to charge more because it’s a better experience than a flight! But only on the NY-DC route.
Buses on the northeast corridor will certainly be cheaper. Trains (especially Acela) are competing with flying given the huge amount of business travel.
> given that it's so heavily subsidized by the government
It's not. Until the recent infrastructure bill, Amtrak didn't even have a dedicated yearly budget. Every year they would beg Congress for some money, get some amount less than that, then prioritize what they could given the funding. Moreover roads in the US never pay for themselves, they're just written off as an "economic driver" rather than expected to pay for themselves. Very few roads in the US are toll roads and much of the US is vehemently against toll roads. Fundamentally, public infrastructure is public infrastructure. The public pays for public infrastructure. If we expect Amtrak to be able to fund some non-trivial percentage of its infrastructure costs then we're placing an expectation on Amtrak that the US road and highway system does not have.
Amtrak hasn't built much new rail. Amtrak maintains its rail and rolling stock and buys new rolling stock. Most of Amtrak's rail routes were originally made by the private rail companies that owned American rail during the Industrial era. Even the lines leased by freight rail was originally made by private rail companies. These companies were going bankrupt and the US government created Amtrak as a holding company to deal with selling off or winding down existing rail assets.
Well, it's not really. It makes money on the Northeast Corridor and loses it on (most of)the rest of the country. A profitable Amtrak would basically service Boston to DC.
